GPF takeout

GPF takeout is a project under development whose final goal is to allow any user to export the threads of any Google Group, although the initial goal will be to export the Spanish Google Calendar Forum in order to preserve its threads, which contain a lot of knowledge.

Initial plan for exporting the forums

The initial plan will be to create two pieces of software with which we will be able to export all the threads: a Chrome extension which will collect all the thread IDs and a PHP script which will save the threads into the file system right from the print page. Therefore, the end result will be a series of HTML files with the contents of every thread, just like this one here.

Chrome extension

In order to export the Calendar Forum, the Chrome extension will be activated from [here] using the old GPF interface (not Hadfield) and it will print a JSON string such as the following:

{forum: "calendar", threads: ["jl5iTKctz2M", "D5WQk-OCWxI", "MBSgJ85gE7g"]}

This string will then have to be saved manually into a file which will be used later on.

PHP script

The PHP script will read from the standard input the JSON file and will begin to download all the threads as HTML documents in a specified folder.

Second iteration of the plan

A better option, which is more difficult to develop, is to read the threads output from the Chrome extension and save their contents into a database. The Pistachio Forums software I developed would be used in order to display the threads.